The trees stood twisted, shriveled husks of their former selves, not a trace of life clinging to their bark. It didn’t feel like some targeted curse. No, this was something worse—like the very air had leeched them dry just by existing. Vorak wouldn’t put it past something exactly like that.

  The Veilwoods stank of burnt sage and… something else. He scrunched his nose. Definitely something fouler. Sulfur, maybe? Or was it that sickly metallic tang of fresh-spilled blood? Hard to tell.

  Every bright-eyed youth in Varkaigrad had grown up on hushed whispers of this haunted stretch of forest. But not Vorak—he didn’t just hear the stories. He lived them. He knew firsthand the kind of madness this place could birth.

  And now, time had looped back on him. Again. Right back to the brink of something unnatural. Last time, he’d been the one to investigate when the fog started creeping out, swallowing folks whole before slinking back into the trees like it had never been there. That fog was legend. No one really knew how it worked—only that these groves had once been sacred. The ancient beastkin had gathered here, offering their kills to their ancestors, feasting by firelight in what was once a hallowed ritual.

  Well, they still did that. Only now, it was on a grander scale, a whole damn festival—The Spirit Hunt.

  And yet, here they were, when Spirit Hunt was not even a month away, and the weird shit was already piling up high enough to choke on.

  Vorak crouched, his gloved fingers brushing the ashen remains of a ritual circle. The symbols etched into the mossy earth weren’t the work of amateurs—too precise, too deliberate. Inverted tetragrams encased in a looping, unreadable script. A summoning, no doubt. But of what?

  That question had been gnawing at him since the day his divination alarms shrieked so loud he damn near soiled himself.

  He’d warned them. Told them exactly what had crossed over. But funny thing about reputation—it takes years to build, but one bad call? One little misstep? And suddenly, you're the village madman.

  Decades in the Iron Pact, one of the highest-cored diviners in the order. That was supposed to mean something. But then came that one jump—just one—and everything went to shit.

  Now, instead of real work, he was Pact’s senile watchdog, exiled to babysit dusty relics at the district’s ass-end. A living alarm bell, spit-shined and ignored. Then that strange awakening happened, and that silver-haired Drakkari girl from the alchemy tower—Jade, was it? He’d seen something in a vision, suspected something. Turned out to be wrong, and just like that, his standing plummeted further.

  Even Andrzej, that milk-smeared brat he’d taught to swing a sword before he’d grown chest hair, had wrinkled his nose at Vorak’s soiled robes. Him! The whelp Vorak had once fished out of a privy after too much mead!

  Fools. An entire carnival of them.

  Andrzej, to his credit, had looked into it. A few divinations here, a few leads there, and he even pinpointed the exact place it happened. But when no one else sensed a damn thing? He was appalled. Since when had the Iron Pact been staffed with so many incompetent fucks?! Ancestors preserve them.

  Still, even with confirmation of the location, something was wrong. Summonings left scars. Tearing a hole in reality wasn’t some neat and tidy affair—it wounded the world, and wounds took time to heal. But here? Nothing. No residual energy, no splintered threads of the world’s fabric, not a whisper of something having crossed over.

  That was impossible.

  Vorak had felt it. He had bled from his goddamned eyes because the sheer immensity of that thing had crushed his defenses like paper. It was here. It happened. And yet, no breach. No scar. No sign.

  A rupture in reality took months to fade, always visible to those with the eyes to see. This left only two possibilities: either nothing happened—which was a blatant lie—or someone, somehow, had parted the fabric of existence with such precision, such delicate control, that it left no trace.

  Which was also impossible.

  That level of mastery would require cognition beyond human limits. A mind so far removed from sanity that even attempting such a feat would liquefy the brain of a lesser being. And yet, someone—or something—had done it. Not just opened a door, but closed it so seamlessly that it may as well have never existed.

  Final verdict? Vorak was a raving madman. His already-wounded reputation took another plunge straight into the abyss, and with more pressing threats looming, all investigations were shelved.

  And fair enough—there was a crisis on the horizon. A certain organization was resurfacing. The Vor’akh. The singular demonic cult of all Vraal’kor.

  Funny, really. Almost the same name as his own. Because it meant the same thing—True Claws.

  Andrzej, of course, had the gall to suspect him of being involved. Thought he was pulling some grand misdirection, throwing up a smokescreen.

  As if Vorak hadn’t bled for the Pact since that prig was still pissing his linens! The accusations didn’t stick. But still, impossible or not, he was here again.

  Three in the gods-damned morning.

  Snow fell in whispering sheets around him, catching the edges of his cloak, melting on his gloves as he clutched a divination crystal. Cold. Unyielding. And silent.

  Even with his spell active, there was no vision. No resonance. No murmurs from the Astral Plane. Just the same dead void as before.

  Every summoning left something behind—echoes, ripples, scars in the veil. Something.

  But this?

  This was like reality itself had been scrubbed clean.

  By a hand far more meticulous than his own.

  "Old man?"

  Vorak’s eye twitched. Why—why—had he dragged this walking hemorrhoid along?

  "It’s Sir Warden to you, you scale-licking turd! Unless you’d like to wear your tongue as boot polish!"

  People called him grumpy. Grumpy was a fucking understatement. He was a bristling porcupine in a world of feather pillows, and the pillows could choke on their own fluff.

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  Sergiy, a young enforcer-in-the-making, hovered at the edge of the clearing, his uniform annoyingly pristine, his expression just a little too dismissive for Vorak’s liking. The boy had a knack for getting himself into detention and an uncanny interest in sealed artifacts. Trouble followed him like a stray dog, and yet, here he was.

  "Whatever. But didn’t the scouts report no disturbances in the city? No missing people, no fires, no… things crawling out of alleys." His gaze flicked to the burned ritual circles. “Look, everyone else thinks you’re off your rocker, but me? I’m… intrigued. Just—any chance the ritual flopped? Backfired? Poof, no monster?”

  Vorak exhaled sharply, knees protesting as he stood. He swept a hand over the ash. It clung to his gloves like powdered bone.

  “Failed rituals don’t erase their own stink, lad. They reek. They weep. They leave behind enough metaphysical pus to fill a brothel’s chamber pot.” He jabbed a finger at the circle, its precision mocking him. “This? This is a taxidermist’s wet dream. All the parts, none of the stench. Spend less time fondling shockblades and more in divination lectures, and you’d know what this is called.”

  Sergiy raised a brow, gauntleted fingers drumming the hilt of his shiny new shockblade—a graduation gift Vorak hadn’t endorsed. “Enlighten me, Sir Warden.”

  “A staged silence,” Vorak growled. “Someone scrubbed the scene cleaner than a whore before confession. Which means either they’re covering their tracks… or flaunting how goddamn untouchable they are.”

  The boy yawned, wide and theatrical. "But why go through all the trouble? If they summoned something, why hide it? And if they didn’t, why leave anything at all?"

  "Distraction."

  The word slipped out before Vorak could temper it.

  Three sleepless nights of poring over reports, of tracing every anomaly in the city, of being dismissed as a paranoid old bastard. But he didn’t give a rat’s arse. Something was happening. Several things, all at once.

  The cultist nest flushed from the Lower District sewers. A hidden chamber, a shrine. A hanged man, inverted, cursed to the bone, and a moat of corpses. Bodies everywhere. They’d only known about it thanks to those two kids who managed to escape. More could be saved because of them. But not the ones already sacrificed.

  And then, the whispers of the Vor’akh emerging.

  And tomorrow. Or rather, today. Since it was 3 AM already. The day everyone was holding their breath for. Something was coming, and it was going to be massive.

  Coincidences were for fools and poets.

  Vorak turned to Sergiy, voice a low rasp.

  "Three days ago. That sewer raid. What did the investigators find?"

  Sergiy blinked, his cocky fa?ade flickering as he scraped together the details. “Uh… the shrine, right? Investigators said it was built from the same grime-caked bricks as the rest of the sewers. Whole operation was tucked into a section sealed off when Varkaigrad’s tunnels were first dug. Found chambers no one’s pissed in for centuries.” He shrugged, but his fingers tightened around his shockblade’s hilt. “Why? What’s it matter?”

  Vorak’s grin was a sickle. “When. Were. The. Sewers. Built?”

  “Hundreds of years ago?” Sergiy parroted, then froze as the implication slithered into his skull.

  “Exactly,” Vorak hissed, stepping closer until his shadow swallowed the boy. “We’ve been living atop a festering wound for generations. A chunk of those tunnels was walled off with illusions so slick, not a single drunk, rat, or Pact lackey stumbled into it. Until now.” He leaned in, breath reeking of bitterroot tonic. “A temple, boy. A gods-damned temple, polished and primed for butchery, squatting in our literal shit. And you think that’s just… luck?”

  Sergiy paled but held his ground. “What’re you saying, old man?”

  “Use that mush between your ears!” Vorak snapped, jabbing a finger at the kid’s temple. “Or did your instructors fill your skull with sawdust and wishful thinking?”

  “Cryptic bullshit isn’t a clue,” Sergiy shot back, defiance brittle. “Spit it out.”

  Vorak sighed. It wasn’t something he could just spit out. But it had been gnawing at him.

  The missing children. No one had properly investigated. Sure, they were from the Lower District, but they were still beastkin, still part of the united front. Why had they dismissed the sewers—the first place any half-competent enforcer would’ve scoured—until two gutter rats led them there by the nose? Why was the Pact suddenly hyperventilating over tomorrow’s “grand threat” while letting rot fester in the shadows?

  It stank. Like a carcass stuffed with lilies.

  Like something else was bubbling beneath.

  His thumb ran over the obsidian amulet at his throat, the surface etched with warding runes, anti-divination sigils. “The Iron Pact’s brass,” Vorak growled. “They’re polishing their swords while the rats gnaw the floorboards. A cult resurrects itself. A summoning leaves no scar. A shrine blooms in the dark, fed on our blindness.” He spat into the snow. “Either our leaders are thicker than troll snot… or they’re winking at the storm.”

  The Vor’akh, dormant for a decade, now rising again. The Iron Pact shifting. A summoning without a summon.

  A cult, sacrificing right under everyone’s noses.

  "Why does it feel like there's a thread tying every event together?" Vorak muttered, his breath misting in the cold air. "What if they’re complementary? All these events, packed into such a short time frame—"

  Then the thought struck him. A bolt of realization.

  "What if tomorrow’s attack… what we’re preparing to defend against… is a feint? A way to force the Pact to fixate on it, while the real rot digs deeper?"

  Sergiy frowned. "But what’s the point? Even here, if no one actually summoned anything—"

  "They did."

  Vorak knelt, pressing his palm to the earth. Cold seeped through his gloves, biting deep. Snow had been cleared from the site earlier, but another layer was already beginning to gather. He barely noticed.

  "The summoning happened. That, I can guarantee. But whatever they called… it didn’t cross over. Whoever performed the ritual knew what they were doing."

  Sergiy’s expression darkened. "Then why bother?"

  "There are many reasons." Vorak’s voice was grim. "Since ancient times, people have stumbled upon places too wild to exist and wished for boons from them. The summoner receives their gift, and whatever grants it returns to the void. But all such entities are sinister by nature. No boon comes without a contract—contracts too twisted to fully grasp. By the time the fool understands what they've done, it's already too late."

  "So… it might be worse than summoning the thing itself."

  "That depends on the entity," Vorak admitted. "But we should be thankful our world’s fabric shields us from places where even horror fears to dwell. And yet—some fools will always find ways to tear at that veil. Summoning is illegal for a reason."

  He stood, but this time, there was something different about him. A glint of satisfaction.

  "If it’s all connected," he murmured, "I might just be able to see how."

  Sergiy caught the shift in his tone. "How?"

  "By not obsessing over the details."

  Golden spell circles flared into existence behind Vorak’s head, swirling like celestial gears. His mana transmuted into something more—something spiritual. His eyes darkened, black bleeding across them like ink spilled upon an ocean.

  His staff struck the frozen ground.

  "I’ve been looking at this all wrong," he said. "Anti-divination only works when a query launched at the Astral Plane is imbued with direction. But right now, we don’t need to track a who or where. We have a chain of events—seemingly unrelated—but linked nonetheless."

  "The answer lies in simplicity itself."

  His gaze snapped to Sergiy. "Grab some parchment. Now."

  Sergiy obeyed, yanking a scroll from his satchel.

  Immediately, images flooded Vorak’s mind. He let the visions pour through him, transcribing them with frantic precision—each stroke of ink capturing the essence of the three events.

  Then, parchment in hand, he placed it over the ritual site.

  His voice dropped to a whisper.

  "A thread that connects all three events."

  "A thread that connects all three events."

  "A thread that connects all three events."

  For the first time, the void did not answer.

  Instead, something took shape.

  A figure—a woman. A Drakkari maiden of impossible beauty, her form poised, her elegance undeniable.

  She stood with her back to him.

  Familiar… this feels familiar…

  A silhouette cut from moonlight and menace. She stood atop a mound of elven corpses, her talons buried in a skull’s sockets. Sinews dangled from her lips like grotesque pasta. Her face—ancestors, her face—was ecstasy incarnate. Not hunger. Glee.

  Then she turned.

  Vorak’s gut clenched. He knew that face.

  “Jade,” he breathed.

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